Osjan (Ossian) - Roots

Osjan (Ossian)
Roots

Label: Milo Records, 2003
Catalog No: ME 101
Format: CD

Tracks:

1. Chapter I Book of Winds
2. Chapter II Book of Winds

Recorded:

1982

Line up:

Jacek Ostaszewski - flute, Chinese bamboo flute, vocal
Wojtek Waglewski - 12 string guitar 12, sanza, vocal
Radoslaw Nowakowski - conga, percussion
Milo Kurtis - calanu, drumle, percussion

About:

OSJAN – the legend of "Polish world music" - was founded in the beginning of the 1970s. Jacek Ostaszewski (recorders) and Marek Jackowski (guitar) were the founders of the group and its first members. When the latter left the group in 1975 the line-up was unstable for some time what resulted in occasional cooperation with Don Cherry and Tomasz Stanko. The "classic" line-up was formed at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, besides Jacek Ostaszewski, the leader, Wojciech Waglewski (guitar), Milo Kurtis (percussion) and Radoslaw Nowakowski (conga drums) have been the members of the band. Nowadays OSJAN is a trio (without Milo Kurtis) and plays concerts not so often, yet each one is celebrated like a feast... But this is how it has always been... 
The traces of cultures from almost all over the world can be found in OSJAN music. Although rhythm – the most primordial and common element of music in all cultures – is the core of this music, the silence between sounds is of the same importance... OSJAN has always been looking for the most fundamental and universal elements of music. OSJAN is both spontaneity and concentration. Simplicity (being not only the result of using simple acoustic instruments) and extreme sophistication (being not only the result of virtuosity of the musicians). "The flying fish music", the term referring to OSJAN, has been prompting listeners, I do hope so, to get rid of any music label and category... With no doubt this is "the flying fish" that "branded" my further music activity... This is what I've been trying to keep in everything I do. To keep this independent way of thinking about music, also in multicultural terms... Well, I'm interested in certain music issues – studying them, learning, solving problems – says Wojciech Waglewski. 
Maybe this is one of the reasons why OSJAN has never stopped to play... And in 2004 won "FRYDERYK", the Polish Phonographic Academy Award for the best "ethno/folk album of the year" for its recent life recording "The Book of Leaves" released in a very unusual way by Ferment Records. OSJAN. The legend. The music of flying fish. The music so difficult to be labeled, to be named. World music. Jazz. Total music. We invite you to listen to it! It works. It does have an impact. As always. As usually... 
Osjan concert is a performance, too, but first of all it is an encounter and conversation of three personalities: Jacek Ostaszewski, a former double bass jazz player in Krzysztof Komeda combo, nowadays a theatre and film music composer collaborating with Zbigniew Preisner, Krzysztof Kieslowski or Krystian Lupa; Wojciech Waglewski, a leader of Voo Voo, one of the most interesting rock band in Poland of recent two decades; Radek Nowakowski, a writer, translator, publisher and book artist.
(Maciej Polinski)

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Like the Wawel dragon, this mysterious band emerged from a cave in Cracow.
Osjan is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating bands on the Polish stage. Formed 28 years ago, they still remain part of the underground. They play concerts infrequently and rarely release records.
Osjan's work can be described as an original synthesis of many traditions and music cultures. The group's strength lies in its enormous musical imagination, creativity and genuine message. The musicians have never attached importance to their public image. Osjan is surrounded by a mysterious aura, and facts about the band's activities merge with legend.
The history of Osjan dates back to the 1970s and Cracow's musical circles grouped around the Piwnica pod Baranami club, then the center of Cracow's artists and counterculture. At that time Jacek Ostaszewski, a well-known jazz double bass player, and guitarist Marek Jackowski, both from the band Anawa, decided to start a new project. Soon they were joined by painter and poet Tomasz Holuj. The group's early rehearsals took place in many different places, most often hotel rooms. The name Osjan was chosen after the band heard it in an Ewa Demarczyk song version of a Boleslaw Lesmian poem.
Soon the band's line-up changed, but for 20 years the core of Osjan has been Dimitrios Milo Kurtis, Wojciech Waglewski and Radosław Nowakowski, together with Jacek Ostaszewski. Numerous distinguished musicians have worked with them including the trumpeters Tomasz Stanko and Don Cherry. The band used to regularly perform with Black Horse Cheavers, a Cherokee shaman.
However, it is not the musicians, but the search for their own artistic expression that explains the Osjan phenomenon. In the 1970s, in an atmosphere ruled by banal rock on the one hand and complicated jazz structures on the other, Osjan looked for a different way, for a simplified form of expression: "For example, we would play for half an hour on two or three notes," remembers Ostaszewski. "What fascinated me, not only in the sphere of music, was the search for forms that would allow free expression, not limited to the conventions of jazz, pop or classical music." Osjan was looking for alternative solutions. The group used various elements of traditional Balkan, African, Slavic and Indian music and managed to combine them with free jazz and European classical music. An important influence on shaping the group's musical image were concerts with Don Cherry, as well as inspiration from Zen Buddhism.
Osjan belongs to the small circle of performers who have developed their own original style. The group's compositions, labeled as ethnic music, world music, and so on, reveal the extent of its members' musical quest, as do their performances. For them, playing music together is a form of communication and constant dialogue between themselves and the audience. That is why concerts, when they do happen, are so important to them-there is a dialogue between Waglewski's guitar and Nowakowski's drums, Ostaszewski's flutes and Kurtis's percussion, but the freedom of improvisation does not destroy the overall structure of the concert.
No wonder then that Osjan's rich experience was emulated by other performers, for example, Maanam (a group formed by Jackowski and Kurtis) in its early days and Voo Voo, another unique Polish rock band, headed by Waglewski.
Osjan's musicians call the time between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s a long "hibernation period," as they were occupied with their own activities-teaching, running workshops and carrying out their own musical, and in the case of Nowakowski, literary, projects. But this did not have a negative influence on the group: "Last year we did a concert tour called Jam Osjan which resulted in a documentary by Andrzej Titkow," says Kurtis. "There were crowds of young people at our concerts in Cracow, Warsaw, Czestochowa and Bydgoszcz. They're the new generation of Osjan fans."

(Anna Kosowska, warsawvoice.pl)